An archive of articles and listserve postings of interest, mostly posted without commentary, linked to commentary at the Education Notes Online blog. Note that I do not endorse the points of views of all articles, but post them for reference purposes.

The great Lenin debate of 2012

(Or, the bankruptcy of “Leninism” Rediscovered)
Over the past several decades, much of the international Left has
come to question the “Leninist” party-building model that was hegemonic
among Western socialists for the majority of the twentieth century. In
the United States, it appears that the crisis of “Leninism” has
sharpened in the years since 2008. While “Leninist” groups are
notoriously prone to factional strife in general, this period seems to
have witnessed an intensified tendency toward splinters and splits
within these groups. Inevitably, this trend has generated new
scatterings of disaffected ex-members, at least a portion of whom remain
active in politics and activism. This process has been aided by the
writings and (in some cases) the ongoing interventions of previous
generations of ex-”Leninists,” who have, no doubt, helped many newly
purged and “bureaucratically excluded” comrades to make sense of their
experience within the sect-based Left. To this end, influential roles
have been played by the likes of Louis Proyect and other former members
of the 1970s-era U.S. Socialist Workers Party. Many former “Leninists”
have also been influenced by such historical critics of sect-based
socialist organizing as Hal Draper and Bert Cochran.[1]
This dynamic is certainly reflective of my personal experience as a
newly-expelled member of the International Socialist Organization (ISO).
To summarize my story in very brief, I was booted out of the ISO in
February alongside my comrades in the (now officially disbanded) ISO
Renewal Faction. During the course of our hard-fought factional struggle
within the ISO, members of the Renewal Faction discussed a number of
articles critical of “Leninism” and socialist sects. To mention a few
pieces in particular, at the height of the factional fight, we passed
around and debated Hal Draper’s “Toward a New Beginning” (1971) and “Anatomy of the Micro-sect” (1973), as well as a number of more recent documents, including Scott Jay’s “On Leninism and anti-Leninism.”[2] Naturally,
these pieces helped us make sense of the stultifying, undemocratic
environment within the ISO and our experience of being ostracized and
defamed by the leadership and their loyalist followers. Notably, since
being purged from the ISO, members of the Renewal Faction appear to have
adopted differing views on the subject of Leninism – and, for that
matter, Trotskyism, as well. Nonetheless, it’s safe to say that our
experience has led us all to develop profound critiques of the
party-building approaches adhered to by socialist sects like the ISO.
For me personally, I can say that – since February – I’ve done a
great deal of reading into some of the many Leftist debates and studies
that deal with the deep-seeded historical and methodological flaws at
the heart of the party-building model still adhered to by much of the
Left. Like so many of my fellow “Leninist” burnouts, I’ve been
particularly influenced by the writings of British academic historian
Lars Lih – the author of the paradigm-shattering study, Lenin Rediscovered, first published in 2005.[3]
Beyond this, I’ve taken particular interest in reviewing one recent
debate that deals specifically with the ISO’s approach to “Leninist”
party building. This is the so-called “Great Lenin debate,” set in
motion in January 2012 when Pham Binh, a former member of the ISO, wrote
a scathing review of a now dated political biography of Russian revolutionary V.I. Lenin.[4] Pham’s review — published online by the Australian socialist journal Links – focused on Building the Party (1975),
the first volume in a three-part series on Lenin by the late Tony
Cliff, the key leader of the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP).[5] In
the months follow its initial release, Pham’s review led to a volume of
responses by activists and scholars in both the United States and
Britain. While most of the replies dealt predominately with historical
questions, the debate inevitably came to take on a more practical
posture as well, with questions of party-building strategy quickly
rising to the fore.
Naturally, at the time, this debate garnered widespread exposure
within much of the Anglophone Left – a development that, I’d argue,
relates to the profound relevance of many of the points brought to light
in Pham’s initial review. Despite this, it’s my view that this debate
is important enough to warrant renewed attention. For this reason, I
have chosen to compile a complete listing of the contents of this
debate, which I’ve included as a “reading list” below. By doing this, my
goal is to assist other activists – including past, present, and
future members of the ISO – that are attempting to make sense of the the
flawed state of the Left today. The greater purpose behind all of this,
of course, is to contribute — in whatever way possible — to the
collective, ongoing task of renewing the international Left.
Before proceeding to this list, however, let me first provide a short
summary of the debate, followed by a few insights about the debate’s
lasting importance.

Tony Cliff and Pham Binh

So why is it that a review of Tony Cliff’s Building the Party –
a book released some 37 years prior to the outbreak of “the great Lenin
debate” – proved to be such a lightning rod for the socialist Left in
2012? The most substantial reason for this relates to the importance of
this particular book within the U.S. ISO – and for that matter, the
group’s former British sister organization, the SWP (as well as other
affiliates and ex-affiliates of the SWP’s International Socialist
Tendency). Since the ISO’s formation in 1977, the group has used Building the Party as
a textbook to guide their organizational activity. This is, fittingly,
the very purpose that this book was written to serve. As Cliff’s fellow
SWP member Duncan Hallas wrote at the time of the book’s release, Building the Party was intended as a “manual for revolutionaries.” Thus, by calling into question the factual accuracy and interpretative merit of
Cliff’s book in his 2012 review, Pham simultaneously cast doubt on the
very party-building model and core mission of both the ISO and the SWP.
For this reason, Pham Binh’s critique of Building the Party functioned not just as a book review – it
also served as an exposition of the methodological flaws and the
historical inaccuracies at the heart of the organizational project
adhered to by these groups.

As an ex-ISO member that had become thoroughly disenchanted with the
stultifying, undemocratic culture that permeates the ISO, Pham
undoubtedly wrote this review with the intention of bringing these very
issues to light. Notably, Pham makes this point in a somewhat explicit
manner in a follow-up piece, released less than a week after his initial review article:

I drew my conclusions about Cliff’s book only after I
closely studied what Lenin said and did and compared it to what Cliff
claimed Lenin said and did. The more I studied, the more striking the
divergences became.
As someone who was a member of the US International Socialist Organization for many years and used Building the Party as
a text to (mis)educate people on Lenin and the Bolsheviks, the nature,
scale and pervasiveness of Cliff’s distortions continually shocked me as
I discovered them.[6]

So what kind of dirt does Pham bring to light in his analysis?

Interestingly, Pham structures his review as a exposition of the
factual errors present in Cliff’s book. The piece thus takes the form of
a chapter-by-chapter analysis of Cliff’s mistakes and distortions. In
this way, Pham frames the review as something of a scholarly
intervention, aimed at calling out Cliff for his sloppy,
factually-inaccurate historical account. On a more subtle level,
however, Pham’s review implies that the real problem with Building the Party is not just the sheer volume of “errors, falsehoods and lies” contained within the book — rather, it relates to the political importance of Cliff’s many factual blunders. As Pham reveals, Cliff presents an image of V.I. Lenin as being what amounts to an apparatchik and a cunning bureaucratic operative.
Thus, in Cliff’s account, Lenin frequently resorts to deception and
behind-the-scenes scheming in order to enforce his will within the
Russian socialist movement. Such actions helped to bring about positive
political results, Cliff’s account seems to imply, because of Lenin’s
unprecedented skills as a Marxist and socialist leader – gifts that
endowed him with the ability to continuously perceive the correct path forward long
before other comrades had come to realize the tasks of the day. As Pham
notes in the opening section of his review, Cliff’s depiction ascribes
what amounts to “superhuman attributes” to Lenin. This is evident – Pham
asserts – in Cliff’s assertions that “Lenin adapted himself perfectly to the needs of industrial agitation” and “[Lenin] combined theory and practice to perfection.”
While Pham does not spell out this point in detail in his initial
review, it’s clear that the flawed depiction of Lenin in Cliff’s Building the Party is a matter of significant political relevance.
Historically, the basis for this faulty analysis stems — in part — from
Cliff’s bureaucratic, top-down view of the socialist movement and his
immediate political agenda at the time he wrote the book in the
mid-1970s.[7] Over
the years, this flawed political vision has — in turn — had a negative
residual impact on generations of ISO and SWP members that have been
encouraged to view this book as a “manual for revolutionaries.”
Given the political implications of Pham’s review, it isn’t
surprising that this piece provoked a shrill, vituperative response from
the leadership of the ISO. This is most evident in a reply article by
Paul D’Amato — a longtime member of the ISO Steering Committee and one
of the group’s leading dogmatists. In his rebuttal, also published in Links, D’Amato blasts Pham’s review as being a “hatchet job” and “a series of poorly aimed potshots” at Tony Cliff.[8]
Even prior to the release of D’Amato’s piece, Pham’s review had also
prompted Leftist historian Paul Le Blanc – a former member of the U.S.
SWP who joined the ISO in 2009 – to pen a pair of dismissive response articles in the days following the review’s release.[9] Just
as D’Amato was soon to do in his rebuttal, Le Blanc’s articles
stridently defend Tony Cliff while simultaneously denouncing Binh for
the critical tone of his review. As Le Blanc proclaims in the
introduction to his first reply piece,
“I have found Comrade Pham’s article… to be disappointing – rendered
much less useful than it could have been, given that its obvious purpose
is to persuade the reader that Tony Cliff’s book is little more than a
mass of ‘egregious misrepresentations’ and ‘has so many gross factual
and political errors that it is useless as a historical study of Lenin’s
actions and thoughts’. This is a demolition job. It doesn’t offer much
that we can use and build on as we face the challenges of today and
tomorrow.”[10]
Following several initial exchanges between Binh and this duo of ISO
theorists, a group of other Leftist authors also joined the fray.
Notable among them was none other than renowned historian Lars Lih. On
February 16, Lih published the first of a series of detailed articles
focusing on historical questions brought to light by this debate in the
Communist Party of Great Britain’s journal, Weekly Worker.[11] Crucially,
while these articles are posed as impartial, scholarly contributions,
Lih’s analysis consistently aligns with arguments presented in Pham’s
review. At the same time, Lih is also harshly critical of a number of
factual and interpretative points presented by both Le Blanc and
D’Amato. Most remarkably, at one point in his February 16 essay, Lih
calls out Paul D’Amato for depicting Lenin as a being what amounts to a duplicitous liar. (Specifically,
Lih’s critique deals with the assessment D’Amato provides of Lenin’s
handling of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party’s 1912 Prague
conference). As Lih insinuates, this is particularly troubling since D’Amato obviously views Lenin as being a figure worthy of political emulation.
In summarizing this point, Lih raises a series of sharp questions about
the ethical outlook of “Leninist” sects in general and the ISO (and
Paul D’Amato) in specific:

D’Amato’s description of Lenin’s duplicity (sorry,
“advantageous tactical maneuvering”) is essentially the same as the one
made by Lenin’s most vehement critics at the time – only D’Amato seems
to approve of rather than condemn Lenin’s behavior. After all, it helped
Lenin fool the Europeans and get party funds! …
I am not a member of any left organization and so I cannot comment on
whether this kind of casual cynicism is the norm – I seriously doubt
that D’Amato would apply it to issues today. But, speaking as a
historian, I maintain that Lenin would have been severely annoyed by
this defense: ah, that Lenin, he was a clever one – by stating the exact
opposite of his real intentions, he reaped factional and financial
advantage! As opposed to the D’Amatos on the left and the Elwoods on the
right, I maintain that Lenin actually behaved in an honest way during
this episode, saying what he meant and meaning what he said.[12]

In addition to Lih’s intervention, this debate also prompted response pieces by, among others, Louis Proyect and a pair of Leftist authors from the Communist Party of Great Britain – James Turley and Marc Macnair.[13]
After the initial flurry of exchanges released from late January to
April, this debate eventually morphed into something of a scholarly
discussion (albeit one with substantial practical relevance) between
Lars Lih and Paul Le Blanc. For the remainder of the spring and much of
the summer, the two historians published a number of articles in both Links and the Weekly Worker that
grappled with various historiographical issues raised by the debate.
Ultimately, the closing shot in this exchange came on September 1, when Links published a final contribution by Paul Le Blanc. The article provides a fitting title for this epic, seven-month-long historiographical battle — “The great Lenin debate.”[14]

So why is “the great Lenin debate” important?

As I see it, this debate is important
because it provides compelling proof that the organizational model
relied upon by “Leninist” sects in general – and, in specific, the ISO
– is based upon a false reading of history.

Granted, this same point has been compellingly argued both prior to
and since the release of Binh’s 2012 book review. To cite one
particularly notable example, Hal Draper’s 1990 article “The Myth of Lenin’s ‘Concept of The Party’ – or What They Did to What Is To Be Done?” backs up this point with eloquence and substantial historical documentation.[15] What’s
more, as already noted, Lars Lih’s academic writings have also done
much to show the faulty understanding of “Leninism” that underpins so
much of the contemporary Left.
Nonetheless, I’d argue that “the great Lenin debate” is somewhat
unique in its ability to expose the fallacious nature of the “Leninist”
approach to party building. The reason for this stems from the
noticeable influence of real-life class struggle and on-the-ground
socialist organizing within this particular exchange. Unlike most the
studies and exchanges on this subject, “the great Lenin debate” took
place within the context of an important moment in the U.S. class
struggle – namely, the Occupy Wall Street movement, which reached its
crescendo in mid-November 2011, just over two months before the release
of Pham’s initial review article. Crucially, this context appears to
have done much to imbue this exchange with a practical focus that
bellies the esoteric, scholarly nature of the debate itself. The reason
for this has much to do Pham Binh’s close involvement in the Occupy
movement. As documented in a series of journalistic accounts and essays
about the movement published throughout late 2011 and early 2012,
Pham was an active rank-and-file participant in Occupy’s New York City
encampment. Naturally, Pham’s writings on the movement are thus infused
with the outlook of someone with a vested interest and material stake in
this struggle. To this end, Pham’s analysis of OWS – while certainly
problematic in a number of regards – is, nonetheless, written with the goal of helping to push this important movement forward. Pham’s astute critiques of the ISO and the socialist Left from this period fit within this mold.[16]
In addition to the influence of Occupy, the “great Lenin debate” also
greatly benefits from the intervention of Lars Lih. In his four
contributions to this debate — each published in Weekly Worker – Lih
provides detailed empirical research to back up a number of claims
initially advanced by Pham Binh. To cite one particularly significant
example, Lih’s articles provide ample evidence to back up Pham’s
contention that, prior to 1917, the Bolsheviks never considered
themselves to be a political party. Rather, they saw themselves as a faction within
a broader, more inclusive, multi-tendency socialist party – the RSDLP.
(And as Lih has repeatedly pointed out in his other writings, the RSDLP
was modeled after none other than the German Social Democratic Party).

On the reading list

Before proceeding, I wanted to say a brief word about how I’ve gone
about formatting the reading list. For one thing, in contrast to typical
bibliographies (which are, of course, ordered alphabetically), I’ve chosen to structure this list chronologically.
Since the debate includes multiple responses and counterresponses
written over the span of several months, structuring the list in this
manner is essential in order to render the content of the debate easily
comprehensible.
What’s more, in addition to the actual debate itself, I’ve also
included a short appendix bibliography that lists other documents of
substantial relevance. This includes a series of articles from a 2010
symposium in the British academic Marxist journal Historical Materialism focusing on Lars Lih’s Lenin Rediscovered.[17] Notably, according to Pham Binh, this symposium provided much of the initial inspiration for his review of Cliff’s Building the Party.
As Pham later pointed out, “What prompted me in the first place to look
at Cliff’s book carefully, chapter by chapter, in the summer of 2011
was Lars Lih’s response to Chris Harman and Paul Le Blanc in Historical Materialism 18. Here, Lih mentioned some of Building the Party’s
factual errors. I was curious to see if there were any errors that Lih
had not brought to light. The rest, as they say, is history.”[18]Ben Smith

Protesters in Lower Manhattan on Wednesday, the three-year anniversary of the first Occupy Wall Street demonstration.

Andrew Renneisen / The New York Times

By COLIN MOYNIHAN

September 17, 2014

Three years after the Occupy Wall Street movement began, an unlikely conflict has emerged over one of the cause’s most precious tools: a Twitter account.
During the primacy of the Occupy movement in New York, people across the country followed @OccupyWallStNYC and other social media accounts to track the latest developments, from encampments to conflicts. Now one group of activists is accusing a former comrade of taking unilateral control of the shared account and locking out the organizers he had once collaborated with.
According to a lawsuit, which was filed on Wednesday in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, the Twitter account was created in summer 2011 by Adbusters, the Canadian magazine that first called for an occupation of Wall Street. The resulting protests began on Sept. 17, 2011.
Adbusters turned the account over to Marisa Holmes, the lawsuit said, a filmmaker and activist who had helped to moderate Occupy meetings in August 2011 in Tompkins Square Park. Ms. Holmes, in turn, gave others access to the account, which now has 177,000 followers.
But in August, Justin Wedes, one of those with access, changed the passwords and locked out his fellow administrators, according to the lawsuit.
“Each and every day that goes by while Wedes remains in control of the Twitter account is another day of plaintiff’s lost opportunity to speak to the Twitter audience that they worked to cultivate and rightly should control,” the suit states.
Mr. Wedes did not respond to requests for comment via phone or email. But in a blog post dated four days after the lockout, he wrote that he disbanded the collective of administrators because relationships among the group had become fractious.
“Clearly the question of ownership of the account is a contentious one, and I don’t pretend to have all the answers,” he wrote, adding that he planned to put the account “in the hands of responsible stewards.”
Ms. Holmes had a different recollection of events, saying that other members of the collective were about to vote Mr. Wedes out of the group.
“The key point is that it was a collaborative project, but he didn’t get that,” she said. “Justin was censoring other people and promoting his own work.”
The account was dormant for about a week, she said. But then the posts began again, apparently written by Mr. Wedes. Some promoted large-scale events like a climate march planned for this weekend in New York. Others referred to projects connected to Mr. Wedes, like a campaign in Detroit protesting the city’s decision to shut off water to residents with unpaid water bills.
Over the years there have been lawsuits between companies and employees about control of Twitter accounts. But the recent suit would appear to present a rare instance of that type of squabble among members of a political protest movement, let alone one that was created largely through the use of social media.
The suit is asking the court to order Mr. Wedes to turn over control of the Twitter account to OWS Media Group. The suit also seeks $500,000 in compensatory damages, and requests an injunction forbidding Mr. Wedes from turning over control of the account to anyone else or sending further messages from the account.
Mr. Wedes did not appear ready to comply. Not long after the lawsuit was filed on Wednesday, the account offered a new post: “Lawyers are the tools of the 1% and their children. We believe in class war.”
The message was deleted less than an hour after it had been posted.

Thursday, August 28, 2014

Sectarian Delusions on the American Left

by LOUIS PROYECT

Another International Socialist Organization Internal Bulletin has been leaked to the public over on the External Bulletin website,
home to a group of former members. It contains an article written by
long-time leader Todd Chretien that targets Socialist Alternative
(SAlt)—the group that is rightfully proud of their comrade Kshama Sawant
being elected to the Seattle City Council and for her role in the
passing of a $15 minimum wage.
I have been partial to Chretien in the past because of his close ties
to the late Peter Camejo, whose gubernatorial campaign in California he
helped organize in 2003. I worked closely with Camejo in the early 80s
and confess to having stolen all my best ideas from him.
The ISO’s chief criticism of Socialist Alternative’s electoral
strategy is that it is “triumphalist”, a musty term from the Marxist
lexicon. Specifically, Chretien regards SAlt’s call for a hundred
independent candidates to run in the 2014-midterm elections as an
“overblown perspective”. In his view, her victory did not necessarily
mean that political conditions had ripened to the point where such a
large number of candidates would be forthcoming. Such “triumphalism”
might even be catching–to the point where ISO’ers would be seduced into
believing that it was feasible to form a new “broad” party in the near
term, or that regroupment of the far left was the order of the
day. Heaven forefend.
The ISO is not the only group on the left that is wary about efforts on behalf of “broad” parties. WSWS.org,
the newspaper of a tiny sect that is hostile not only to SAlt but also
to the ISO (and just about everyone else on the left as well), told its
readers:

Socialist Alternative has called for a new coalition of
like-minded groups, in alliance with the trade unions, to run 100
“independent” candidates in local elections next year. Their aim is to
establish a political framework analogous to Syriza in Greece, the Left
Party in Germany, and the New Anti-capitalist Party in France.

In tracking down SAlt’s call, it turns out to be more what we might
call food for thought rather than a promissory note. From the Kshama Sawant website:

As a concrete step to get there, we should form
coalitions throughout the country with the potential to come together on
a national level to run 100 independent working-class candidates in the
2014 mid-term elections. The unions who supported the Moore and Sawant
campaigns and many others should run full slates of independent
working-class candidates in the mid-term, state, and local elections.

Chretien points out that the 100 independent candidates have not
materialized, a sure sign of SAlt’s pie-in-the-sky tendencies. But was
such a call anything more than what we used to call “propaganda” in the
American SWP? (For some odd reason the ISO has studied the SWP for
useful hints about party-building. In my view, this is like studying the
Hindenburg or the Titanic for transportation ideas.)
Before it became a dirty word, propaganda meant raising an idea that
could inspire people to take political action. For example, Lenin used
to propagandize for a constituent assembly in Czarist Russia whether or
not it was immediately on the agenda. I for one think that the call for a
hundred independent candidates was not only right but also one that
could be raised again in the next election cycle, to use the hackneyed
term from CNN and MSNBC.
With respect to the Syriza question, it is not exactly clear that
SAlt is so gung-ho on a broad party. In the most recent Greek elections
their comrades ran their own campaign as a way of differentiating
themselves from a party that they have characterized as “inadequate” and
adhering to “watered down” demands. So, WSWS.org can breathe a sigh of
relief.
Unlike the people behind WSWS, the ISO is at least verbally committed
to the idea of a Syriza type formation in the USA. Just over a year ago
their leader Ahmed Shawki gave a talk to an ISO conference that pointed
in such a direction even if it ultimately led nowhere. One must
conclude that both the ISO and SAlt are both capable of making
unfulfilled projections. I urge that they be forgiven for such
peccadillos.
Probably worried a bit about the smaller organization breathing down
the ISO’s neck, Chretien calls attention to a SAlt article filled with
the characteristic bravado of small propaganda groups convinced of their
special role in the final showdown with capitalism. The article speaks
of having picked up new members in 45 cities and projects the group
doubling in size this year, mostly on account of Kshama Sawant’s high
profile.
Like Hertz deriding Avis, Chretien dismisses all this as “irrational
exuberance”, Yale economist Robert Schiller’s term for stock market and
real estate bubbles. One can understand why he would be so skeptical. It
was not so long ago that the ISO itself had the illusion of nonstop
growth until it ran into the glass ceiling all such groups impose upon
themselves with their ideological purity and their bogus notions of
“democratic centralism”. If SAlt’s goal was to become a party of 1,000
members, history will record that it is certainly within reach. But in a
country of nearly 300 million people, that is like spitting into the
ocean. The sad reality is that it is only a broad left party that can
begin to reach those millions, something that neither the ISO nor SAlt
is ready to acknowledge except as an abstraction. In reality it would
require dissolving themselves into a much larger movement and thus
losing their precious individuality.
Let me turn now to the rather arcane matter of how the ISO
distinguishes itself from SAlt in terms of their revolutionary bona
fides, a topic that I am sure would make most CounterPunch readers’ eyes
glaze over. I will do my best to make my account as lively as possible.
SAlt’s “irrational exuberance” was something they supposedly caught
like a bad cold from their leadership in Britain, where the Committee
for a Workers International is based. This latest attempt to build a
Fourth International has the same tendency as every one in the past,
going back to the days when Leon Trotsky was running the show. It
revolves around the idea that a prerevolutionary situation exists and
that it will be squandered unless Leninist parties are built in the nick
of time. Chretien scoffs at the CWI’s claim that their South African
section was in the vanguard of the working class given their tiny vote
(0.05). We are led to believe that Socialist Alternative has the same
delusions of grandeur.
Of course, such projections are essential for groups in the
“Leninist” mold. How else would you persuade young people to give up so
much of their time, energy and money unless they felt that socialism was
on the near-term agenda? What tends to happen with such groups is
burn-out as people reach their 30s or 40s and the cold, hard reality
sinks in that capitalism stands before them like an immovable object
when their small numbers are quite resistible. The only force capable of
making a dent in that immovable object will have to accept people on
their own terms. The largely Black and Latino NYC subway work force that
is quite capable of bringing Wall Street to its knees by not reporting
to work and that supported the Occupy movement is not likely to attend 3
meetings a week or fit in with a milieu largely made up of white kids
who attended Columbia University and other top-drawer institutions.
Chretien also takes issue with CWI leader Peter Taaffe’s claim that a
“rapid and peaceful socialist transformation” of society is possible,
an obviously revisionist notion. No such illusions exist in the
ideologically granite-hard ISO that would never make such errors.
Instead of succumbing to parliamentary cretinism as they used to put it a
century ago, the ISO has an “extra-parliamentary” orientation. What
Chretien fails to mention is that Taaffe was not speaking about Fabian
socialist gradualism but rather about one of the most
“extra-parliamentary” struggles of the past 50 years, namely the
May-June 1968 events in France when workers and students built
barricades and seemed poised to take power. Taaffe wrote:

There is not only the sombre tragedy of Chile, but the
brilliant example of France, when in May 1968 over 10 million workers
participated in a magnificent general strike. The economy was paralysed
and the state suspended in mid-air. When General de Gaulle fled in panic
to the headquarters of the French forces in Germany, his
commander-in-chief, General Massu, told him bluntly that it would be
impossible for the army to intervene against the working class under
those conditions. A rapid and peaceful socialist transformation of French society would have been entirely possible.

In other words, Taaffe was not talking up Norman Thomas but V.I.
Lenin. A “rapid and peaceful socialist transformation” was possible in
the same way that it was possible in October 1917. Bloodshed only came
when Soviet Russia was invaded, after the relatively peaceful initial
conquest of power. One hopes that Chretien can avoid quoting his
adversaries out of context in the future. Such behavior does not reflect
well on him.
Chretien complains about SAlt reneging on promises to work with the
ISO on election campaigns: “It remains to be seen if SAlt can overcome
its sectarian tendencies and learn how to genuinely collaborate
with other forces on the left.” Who can say why (or even if) this
haughty attitude was manifested? Similar complaints were raised about
the ISO when their rivals approached them about endorsing Sawant’s first
campaign for city council. My experience with these sorts of “he said,
she said” disagreements is that both parties share blame. Since they are
fighting for market share, there is an almost inevitable tendency to
blame each other when an agreement can’t be reached like in a failed
corporate merger.
Finally, Cretien draws a contrast between the ISO and the group that it can see gaining rapidly in its rear view mirror:

Our stated goal is no different from Socialist
Alternative’s. We are “dedicated to the project of creating a
revolutionary workers’ party as a part of a worldwide movement for
socialism.” However we are going about this task in way that is
different from SAlt’s approach. Our vision is not that the ISO will just
become the revolutionary workers party when it reaches a certain size
and we drop the “O” and add a “P.” The creation of real mass party of
revolutionary workers will undoubtedly involve forces larger than us.
Our work is in the creation and development of Marxist militants who are
able be involved with those larger forces, movements and unions in
order to weave the threads that will in the future pull sections of
these forces into that thing that will be a party.

One of the things I have learned about the Leninist left over the
years is that except for the nethermost reaches like WSWS.org or the
Spartacist League, it is de rigueur to make disclaimers like it
“will undoubtedly involve forces larger than us.” The problem is that we
are not interested in what happens down the road. We are focused on
2014 when small left groups have a heavy responsibility for taking the next step
to draw in larger forces. The ISO, like the Socialist Alternative, is
an energetic, uncompromising, principled group that we can appreciate
for its efforts. However, we are in a period of deepening class
confrontation where everybody on the left will be sorely tested as to
their ability to transcend artificial divisions that weaken us in the
face of the enemy. The time to overcome such divisions is now, not in
the distant future. In fact actions that we take today, or fail to take,
will have an impact on the relationship of forces down the road. Unless
we begin to move away from sectarianism today, our chances of success
in the future will be compromised if not entirely thwarted. One hopes
that both the ISO and Socialist Alternative can rise to the occasion.Louis Proyect blogs at http://louisproyect.org and is the moderator of the Marxism mailing list. In his spare time, he reviews films for CounterPunch.

Friday, August 22, 2014

Good cops, dedicated and skilled ones, learn how to look for signs of criminal behavior instead of profiling by race ...good policing requires judgment, being able to tell the difference between a black teenager in sneakers who’s running because he just snatched a purse and one who’s running because his mother said he had to be home for dinner by 6pm....a former Baltimore city cop and Maryland state trooper, told me in 2012. Police who are “serious about their craft” watch out for the body-language cues that indicate when someone’s carrying a gun or looking to break into parked cars. To search large numbers of people instead of patiently observing to see who the real bad guys are, he said, is both unconstitutional and lazy policing.

For a left-wing newspaper, I thought Steven Wishnia went outside the "usual left suspect" piece. Rarely do you see terms like "the craft of policing." And just like we know that the attacks by ed deformers on teachers are unfair by lumping them all in one bag, we might also be concerned about lumping all police in one bag.

They included a photo of Josmar Trujillo, who I know from my gym and from some of his struggles over his kids' charter school and leadership of stop and frisk activities in Rockaway. Josmar is one of the most articulate people I know and he has appeared on the WNYC Brian Lehrer show.

Barely six months after New York City's charter school movement seemingly secured its future with sweeping legislation in
Albany, advocates are gearing up for a new battle in the upcoming
legislative session to eliminate or increase the cap on the number of
new charters that can be created.
Emboldened by their legislative successes last session, thank to help from Governor Andrew Cuomo,
charter leaders and groups are in the early planning stages of
launching a unified push to get the cap extended or eliminated as a
line-item in this year's final budget. Sources said that meetings with
legislators will likely begin later this fall after the governor's
race, and intensify throughout the winter.
New York City will likely have just 17 slots for new charter schools by this fall, assuming that the charterproposals currently under review are approved, as is widely expected.
Advocates say they're optimistic about their chances, which would all but guarantee rapid growth for the charter sector.

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"Usually the conditions that lead to lifting a cap
include long waitlists for charters, strong academic performance and
many successful models that you want to replicate, support from
political leaders and a strong, vocal advocacy infrastructure," said
Nina Rees, the president and C.E.O. of the National Alliance for Charter
Schools. "It is the right place to completely lift the cap," Rees said,
adding her group, which has national influence, will help in the effort
to extend the cap if local advocates ask.
Advocates are
expecting more support from Cuomo, who took up the charter cause in a
very public way this year by siding with Success Academy leader Eva
Moskowitz and other charter leaders in a fight with the city, and muted
opposition from Mayor Bill de Blasio, who was on the losing side of that
fight.
A spokeswoman for Cuomo referred Capital to a budget
official, who noted that the statewide cap still allowed room for
charter growth outside of New York City.
"The breaks start to go
on now in terms of ability to plan new charters," said James Merriman,
C.E.O. of the New York City Charter School Center. He also said that, as
the cap quickly approaches, "the cap starts to look like the Berlin
Wall. It's simply an artificial barrier."
Merriman believes New
York City will have a strong case to make in removing its charter cap,
which would ensure that the city's charters have both a dedicated
funding stream for charter facilities and unlimited room to grow.
"It's fundamentally a crazy policy to put any limit on creating more successful public schools," he said.
New
York City's charter cap was created under New York's original 1998
charter law allowing 200 schools statewide, and was extended by 114
schools during a 2010 fight in Albany over the cap. New York state and
New York City have different caps; there are still 139 slots available
for upstate charters.
Fresh off her victory
in Albany against Mayor Bill de Blasio earlier this year, Success
Academy C.E.O. Eva Moskowitz is likely to emerge as one of the leaders
of the charter cap push. Noting the shrinking cap, Moskowitz applied to
open 14 new charter schools by 2016 with the remaining charter slots,
which will nearly double the size of her charter network.
"[Moskowitz]
is sitting on a goldmine, and would make a great advocate to make the
case for lifting the cap," said Rees, whose group recently appointed
Moskowitz to its "charter hall of fame." A spokeswoman for Moskowitz
declined to comment.
Devora Kaye, a Department of Education
spokeswoman, said "as we work to support all children and educators, we
look forward to collaborating with all community stakeholders."
Opposition from the United Federation of Teachers and its affiliates is all but guaranteed, meaning a familiar series of rallies and counter-rallies will likely flood the Capitol in 2015.
"Given
the charters' track record, the cap should be lowered," Michael
Mulgrew, president of the U.F.T. said in a statement. "Raising the cap
will drain more money from New York's traditional public schools, and
the only ones to benefit will be a few people in the charter industry."
During the 2010 cap battle, union leaders and charter critics worked in more regulations on how
many special needs students and English language learners charters
would have to admit, by way of compromise. Charter advocates say more
regulations in that vein will be likely to pass legislation this time
around.
And while the 2010 charter cap fight was lengthy and contentious,
the national picture is encouraging for the local charter sector, as
many states have successfully eliminated their caps. According to
research from the National Alliance, the majority of states with
unlimited charters originally had caps. Some states, like Colorado and
Maine, have charter laws with sunset provisions that will eventually
eradicate the caps the laws were passed along with. Others, like Iowa,
Louisiana and Tennessee lifted their caps in order to be eligible to
receive federal Race to the Top funding.

Ohanian Note: In a 2004 NPR interview New Leaders CEO Jonathan Schnur explained that if you can lead an Army unit in Iraq, you can turn around a failing school in New York City.

From September 2008 to June 2009, Jon Schnur,
Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of New Leaders for New Schools, was on leave from New Leaders for New Schools, serving as an advisor to Barack Obama's Presidential campaign, a member of the Presidential Transition Team, and a Senior Advisor to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

The Common Core State Standards are here and, as with any new initiative, there are the inevitable questions and concerns, debate and discontent. Pathways to the Common Core does not take sides; rather, the authors acknowledge the range of opinions swarming around the CCSS and wisely focus their energy on making sense of the standards. They provide a clear examination of what is and isn t stated and then invite us to seize this opportunity to reflect on our practice and to become co-constructors of the -- Terrence P. Carter, Ph.D., Curriculum & Instruction Department, Academy for Urban School Leadership, National Teachers Academy, Chicago

Carter is scheduled to receive a Ph.D. in August 2014. If they ever release his dissertation to the public, plenty of people will be looking for plagiarism.

by Jon Lender

Terrence P. Carter's chances of becoming New London's superintendent of schools seem remote, now that newspaper disclosures have sparked an investigation into whether he misrepresented his education credentials in past years and copied others' published writings in his 2014 job application.

But it wasn't so long ago that the onetime Chicago school principal was being hailed by school-reform advocates as a model for a national new wave of education administrators.

To fully understand the Carter episode, it helps to look at him in the context of a national battle over non-traditional school-reform efforts. The high praise that he received from influential voices in recent years sounds almost ironic now -- as New London's school board has its law firm conducting an investigation that could send him packing.

"Terrence Carter represents a new breed of principals who entered the profession from business through an excellent principal training program called New Leaders for New Schools. The program, which operates in Chicago and five other cities and is about to add two more, imposes higher expectations on principals," the Chicago Tribune said in an editorial Feb. 4, 2007.

Carter then was principal of Clara Barton Elementary School, in a poor Chicago neighborhood, after receiving training at New Leaders, a national non-profit school-reform group co-founded by Jonathan Schnur, a former Clinton White House staffer and Obama campaign adviser.

Carter's standing in the school-reform movement was such that in 2009 he accompanied Schnur to a presentation at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. The topic was New Leaders' partnership with Chicago in the "turnaround" of several low-performing inner-city schools.

"New leaders like Terry" have made "dramatic gains" in student performance, Schnur said in a presentation that helped win an "Innovations in American Government" award from the Kennedy School's Ash Center for the New Leaders-Chicago schools initiative.

"Terry for example -- he didn't spend 15 years as an assistant principal, but he was a chief learning officer at a Fortune 500 company working with and managing adults, and a former teacher, and brought that blend of skills to bear," Schnur said in remarks still watchable on YouTube (http://youtu.be/sHjWtePruMU).

"We first understood that there were individual schools and classrooms ... where kids ... in poverty, kids of color, kids who'd been underserved educationally, were achieving high levels.... But there weren't many," Schnur said. "And in every one of those cases there was a principal [who] had . . . high expectations, who was a strong instructional leader, who could lead adults [and] engage the community."

'Lean On Me'

Carter fit that mold, according to Schnur.

Carter told the Harvard audience: "Those of you that have ever seen the movie 'Lean on Me,' [about] Joe Clark -- the school that I was assigned to was very much similar to that," he said. "It was a bastion of discipline and behavior problems [and] low performing test scores." Those scores turned around dramatically in three years, he said.

The Obama administration has been receptive to school-reform efforts by groups like New Leaders. Obama appointed his fellow Illinois native, Arne Duncan, as secretary of education after Duncan ran the Chicago schools, cooperating with school reformers and engineering oft-controversial school "turnaround" projects where "new breed" principals were inserted.

Chicago was an early battleground in what's become a national controversy between traditional educators and teacher unions, on one side, and, reform activists such as New Leaders and charter school operators on the other. That fight is playing out in Connecticut, where Democratic Gov. Dannel Malloy has appointed a charter school co-founder, Stefan Pryor, as a state education commissioner who supports turnaround efforts in low-performing schools.

Skeptics about such efforts in Connecticut see more in the Carter controversy than just one candidate whose credentials and character have been questioned.

"This is how the pro-privatization, big-philanthropy-funded networks and organizations tend to work. They pass their own people along and up, greasing rails and plumping resumes as they go. And the main criteria for 'success' often seems not to be real leadership characteristics, so much as willingness to be a good soldier when it comes to pushing forward a particular reform agenda," said Lauren Anderson, an assistant professor of education at Connecticut College in New London.

"Certainly, it should worry people when these are the same groups arguing for loosening licensure and deregulating educator preparation," Anderson said. "I mean, this candidate is someone that these groups vetted and held up as an exemplar, someone who has been on the receiving end of their 'coaching' and 'mentoring.' ... What's their explanation for how this all came to pass?"

Anderson spoke against Carter's hiring at a July 24 meeting in New London when the school board put off a scheduled vote to approve a contract for Carter -- and instead instructed its legal counsel, Shipman & Goodwin in Hartford, to look into newspaper disclosures including the fact that Carter had used the titles Dr. and Ph.D. for years without holding a degree from an accredited university.

Other newspaper revelations: he filed for bankruptcy twice; his application essay included long passages identical with other educators' writings on the Internet; a national research organization released a copy of a bio that it says Carter submitted in 2011 with the claim that he had a Ph.D. from Stanford University, which Stanford says he does not; and he got a Ph.D. in 1996 from "Lexington University" -- which doesn't have a campus and had a website offering degrees for several hundred dollars with the motto "Order Now, Graduate Today!"

Carter met in closed session with the school board on July 24, and said afterward that he did nothing wrong, never misrepresented his credentials to anyone now or in the past, and still wanted the job.

He has declined comment on specifics -- such as the claim to a Stanford Ph.D. in the bio that the American Institutes for Research said it received from him in advance of a scheduled 2011 speaking engagement. But his lawyer, William McCoy of New London, said in recent days that "we're prepared to cooperate" with the school board's investigators "whenever we're asked the questions."

The Honeymoon

Carter had been selected by the school board in June, with Pryor's endorsement, to begin running the troubled New London school system starting Aug. 1. At the time, he was the toast of New London and, in comments quoted by the Day newspaper, he invoked the name of Duncan, Obama's national education secretary.

The story noted that the Chicago-based Academy for Urban School Leadership -- the education-reform group he'd been working for since leaving his principal's job in 2010 -- had been praised by Duncan and Rahm Emanuel, the former Obama chief of staff who now is mayor of Chicago. Carter said in the story that back in Chicago a decade ago, Duncan, then running the Chicago schools, had handpicked him from the New Leaders training program for school administrators.

"He saw my presentation and said, 'I need this guy in Chicago,'" Carter said in the Day article.

Duncan's deputy press secretary declined a Courant request Thursday an interview with the national school chief or a statement about Carter.

Carter's current problems with newspaper stories started with a Courant report on July 18 about his repeated use of Dr. and Ph.D. with his name, and his unaccredited degree from Lexington. The Day on July 29 reported that parts of Carter's job application essay were identical with language in Internet articles.

The group New Leaders had posted a note congratulating Carter on its Facebook page in June, when his selection by New London was announced. It's been removed. "We did post a congratulations to Facebook to Terrence Carter on his potential appointment when that was originally reported in local press. Once it was reported in local press that Terrence's appointment was delayed, the message became inaccurate, and so was removed," Benjamin Fenton, the group's other co-founder, and chief strategy officer, said in an email Friday.

On the issue of licensure and certification, Fenton said that "all candidates who successfully complete the New Leaders program" -- including Carter -- "are fully certified to be principals in their respective states, and must meet all requirements without exception for principal certification as well as demonstrate all of the required competencies expected by the New Leaders program."

Schnur, the New Leaders co-founder and former CEO who spoke at Harvard with Carter in 2009, declined comment Thursday.

Meanwhile, Carter awaits the outcome of the New London inquiry, which is expected to wrap up in a couple of weeks to permit a final board decision within 30 days of the July 24 meeting.

Carter's lawyer, McCoy, was asked if he thinks his client has any prospect of ever signing a contract. "I think the difficulty at this point in time is whether or not he could successfully work in this atmosphere," he said. But he added that Carter is willing to negotiate "to get a resolution to this" and still wants the job.

Anderson, however, said: "I cannot imagine a situation in which this candidate now becomes the superintendent. And at this juncture, like a lot of people who care deeply about New London, I'm more concerned with the process -- how it went awry, what role the state played, and how the community moves forward from here."

Jon Lender is a reporter on The Courant's investigative desk, with a focus on government and politics. Contact him at jlender@courant.com, 860-241-6524, or c/o The Hartford Courant, 285 Broad St., Hartford, CT 06115 and find him on Twitter@jonlender. — Jon LenderHartford Courant

Monday, July 28, 2014

Francesca Gomes teaches at a Brooklyn middle school. She will be a member of the new MORE steering committee beginning a 6-month term on August 1. She is a member of Socialist Alternative, which has run candidates in some municipal elections, most notably in Seattle where they elected an SA member to the City Council who spearheaded the highest minimum wage law in the nation.

Austerity Contract for NYC Teachers – More Attacks, More Need for Unified Fightback

For the past dozen years, the American elite has pursued a relentless agenda of “education reform,” which has aimed to privatize large sections of the education system and drastically weaken the strength of the teacher unions. The recent negotiations for a new contract for 110,000 education workers in the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) in New York City was an important opportunity to push back against these relentless attacks. But unfortunately this opportunity was missed when the leadership of the union came back from negotiations with a 9 year austerity contract, which a demoralized membership largely accepted. This setback has real negative consequences for the teachers’ unions nationally and for other municipal unions in New York City.

De Blasio’s “Tale of Two Cities” Rhetoric

New York City’s new Mayor Bill de Blasio ran under the banner of addressing inequality as he described New York as a “tale of two cities,” rife with inequalities in housing, early childhood education and police tactics” (“De Blasio Asks City to Address Its Inequalities,” By Michael Barbaro. New York Times 5 Aug 2013). Furthermore, he sold himself as a friend to the unions. Almost the entire municipal workforce of 350,000 were working under expired contracts while de Blasio’s predecessor Bloomberg, a notorious anti-union mayor, was in office.

Photo: Christie M Farriella / New York Daily News

De Blasio also promised a serious change in education policy from that of Bloomberg, who had been one of the top education “deformers” in the U.S. Bloomberg pretended he cared about the fate of working class and poor children. But the net result of his policies, as described succinctly in a recent New York Times headline, is that “Public Schools in New York City Are Poorer and More Crowded” (2 July 2014). In order to contrast himself with this image, De Blasio quickly appointed Carmen Fariña, a former teacher, principal, and district superintendent, as the Chancellor of the Department of Education (DoE). This looked to teachers, like a hopeful development, as Fariña promised to fight alongside de Blasio against high-stakes testing for universal pre-K, funded by taxing the wealthy, and for more arts programs in city public schools. De Blasio and Fariña said they were also against charter co-locations, and school closings.
However, a month after de Blasio’s inauguration, he “approved 36 charter schools to share space with other schools” (“Bill de Blasio Is Actually More Helpful To Charter Schools Than Some Republicans, Report Says” [The Huffington Post 7 Apr 2014]). Carmen Fariña, not surprisingly, did not utter a word of protest.

The Legacy of UFT President Michael Mulgrew

Like de Blasio, UFT President Michael Mulgrew and the UFT leadership’s dominant Unity Caucus has a poor history of fighting against the privatization represented by charter schools and the use of standardized testing in New York City. The UFT leadership has yet to attempt a mobilization of the membership against charter schools’ use of public school buildings, which usually results in the original public school becoming squeezed for resources and makes them more likely to do poorly on standardized tests.
And last year, the UFT leadership agreed to a deal with the DoE that uses standardized test score as 20% – 40% of a teacher’s annual evaluation – with the added caveat that if these test scores are deemed low enough to rate a teacher as “ineffective,” this trumps all other parts of the evaluation and the teacher automatically receives an “ineffective” rating – illogically proclaiming that this meant the new system took more power away from the subjective assessments of principals and was therefore a victory.

The Proud Sale of an Austerity Contract

As the UFT had gone longest out of all the key municipal labor unions in the city without a contract (the last expired in October of 2009), it was the first to engage in negotiations with the new mayor. On May 1st, the UFT leadership brought de Blasio’s first contract proposal to its membership. UFT President Michael Mulgrew crowed that the education issues were the time-consuming parts of the negotiations, but that the raises had been offered immediately, as soon as the mayor realized the UFT was “willing to be reasonable.”
The raises were deceptively described as “generous,” at 18%. However, there were quite a few issues. One was that the contract is 9-years long, which means that the raises will average 2% a year. This number does not even keep up with the headline rate of inflation, which is significantly less than the actual rise in the cost of living experienced by most working people in New York. In addition, whereas back pay is normally given in a lump sum upon contract ratification, Mulgrew and de Blasio insisted that this would bankrupt the city, as the money was not available in the labor reserve. No mention was made of the vast amounts of money spent on data analysis, payments to the Pearson test making company, and corporate consultants, all of which could be diverted into teacher salaries. The “no money” argument was used to support the back pay and raises owed for prior years being spread out over the course of 7 ½ years.
At a deeper level, the whole argument used to justify the lack of real wage increases (i.e. raises above the rate of inflation) which will now be used to justify similar deals with other city unions, rests on a giant lie. Tens of billions of dollars flowed into the coffers of Wall Street banks in the depths of the financial crisis while city services including education were cut to the bone. The number of teachers was allowed to shrink by several thousand even though there were no fewer children in the school system, leading to ever more crowded classrooms. Now, if finance and real estate profits are anything to go by, the city is experiencing a mini-boom. Even a minimal transaction tax on sales of stocks and shares in the city would be sufficient to reverse all the cuts to education and pay for real wage increases for all city workers.
The contract also includes several other measures eroding teacher rights. Teachers displaced from “failing” schools closed by the DoE , or ATRs, continue to be rotated, staying at each school for one week, but they are now subject to proceedings to strip them of their licenses and be terminated if two principals report that their behavior is in any way “problematic.” They will then undergo a one-day termination hearing. With the increase in support for charter schools, approved by the UFT leadership, more and more teachers will be displaced and subject to this dangerous, tenure-attacking system.
The UFT even agreed to include moves towards further privatization of schools, lauding a clause that creates 200 new “PROSE” schools, in which most union rules can be suspended, including those regarding the length of the school day and year. The teachers in these schools will be largely outside union jurisdiction, and there is a very real danger that if the students in these schools get higher standardized test scores, the proposal for the next contract will insist that things like tenure, a reasonable work day, and summer vacations are holding the city’s children back and should be eliminated.
In addition, a thinly disguised form of merit pay was introduced, allowing for up to $20,000 to be added to the salaries of teachers who take new “career ladder” positions, one of which is acting as a “peer validator,” a position that asks them to evaluate teachers rated “ineffective” by their principals. This will be even more divisive than other proposed merit pay schemes.
What is even more important is what was missing from the contract. Class size was not lowered, and instead of moving towards a reduction in standardized testing, the contract expressly confirms the use of standardized test results as 20% – 40% of a teacher’s rating, an astoundingly hypocritical proposal from a mayor, chancellor, and union president who passionately insist they are against so much standardized testing in schools. For all his talk of inequality, de Blasio presented teachers with a contract that measured them based on test results that are largely tied to levels of poverty in the neighborhoods they serve, effectively denying the fact that inequality in the distribution of New York City’s money and resources has any effect on the educational opportunities of our most vulnerable children.
In reality, a huge opportunity was missed to begin a push back against education reform in the biggest city in the U.S. Key to this agenda is “high stakes” testing, which has been used as a battering ram to close schools, open charter schools and tie teacher pay and evaluations to allegedly objective “performance”. Education reform backed by billionaires like Bill Gates and the Waltons (owners of Walmart) has strong support from both Democrats and Republicans.
Union leaders like Mulgrew said it would not be right to put too much pressure on “friends” like de Blasio. But the absolute opposite was true. For many reasons, de Blasio wanted to make a popular deal. If the membership had been mobilized to push for real measures to move away from high stakes testing as well as real wage increases, this could have resonated with the public and other city workers and forced de Blasio’s hand.

The Opt-Out Movement

Since the union leadership has utterly failed to take the lead in fighting high stakes testing, it has been left to a grassroots movement, led by parents and rank and file teachers, with the support of some school principals, to take action. Referred to as the “Opt-Out Movement,” it involves parents instructing their children to decline to take the test while sending them to school with a letter stating their refusal to allow their children to be subjected to three days of 90-minute tests in English and Math. Alternatively, some school staffs and principals have decided to refuse to administer the tests due to widespread opposition from parents. It is criminal that the union leadership has refused to come out and support this movement which could develop in the coming years into a serious challenge to education reform.

A Lack of Unity

While many teachers were able to see the contract for what it was, the only organized protest against it was mounted by the Movement of Rank and File Educators (MORE). Though the effort made by this group was truly commendable, it currently has too small of a base to mount an effective attack or empower the teachers in a city with such a vast, sprawling geography and such a high number of schools. In most schools, only the rose-colored version of the contract promoted by the leadership and its Unity Caucus (which included outright lies) was heard. If all UFT members had properly heard both sides of the argument, the vote would have been much closer.
From the use of fear tactics by the current UFT leadership to its acceptance of charter schools and standardized testing, it has shown that it is entirely incapable of and has no intention of even attempting to stage a fightback against the erosion of teachers’ rights. Its “strategy” at the moment appears to boil down to the mantra “we must trust our friends”, de Blasio and Fariña. This led inevitably to the need to present the austerity contract as a victory.
It must also be said that part of the context for the 77% vote in favor of the contract was the extremely low expectations of a deeply demoralized membership, which also had little faith in the leadership to get something better if it was sent back to the bargaining table. An article on the MORE website entitled “Disappointment” states that: “Most of the members with whom we spoke who approved this contract only did so because they felt it was the best our union could do,” and this was a direct effect of the union leadership’s campaign to scare teachers into accepting the deal, insisting that “the money [would] go away” if it were not ratified.
Rebuilding the fighting confidence of the union rank and file is not a straightforward process. The recent winning of a $15 minimum wage in Seattle shows working people can win real victories when they mobilize at a grassroots level. Union members, however, are contending with a leadership that actively works to reinforce their fear and demoralization, while presenting themselves as the strength of the union, instead of mobilizing their membership to exercise its own strength.

Further Dangers for All NYC Workers

This contract does not only affect the New York City’s teachers. Due to the de facto system of pattern bargaining, which is what made the 4% raises for the first two years of the retroactive contract (as that is what other municipal labor unions were given), there will be the expectation that all other municipal labor unions negotiating a retroactive contract will be offered the same raises as the UFT (0% for 2011-12, then for each of the next school years: 0%, 1%, 1%, 1%, 1%) as part of pattern bargaining. It remains to be seen if other unions, like that of the NYPD, FDNY, and Department of Sanitation will accept this kind of austerity measure. Regardless, the ratification of this contract is disastrous for the system of pattern bargaining, which has been the one way in which New York City unions have shown a measure of solidarity with each other, threatening to turn worker against worker at the very time we should be unifying to form a true fightback. Already, New York City’s Health and Hospitals Corporation members of Chapter 1199 of the SEIU have been offered a contract with the same delayed implementation of raises, 1% raises for each of several years covered by the contract, and the threat of paying into healthcare down the road (nyc.gov 25 June 2014).
The leaderships of municipal labor unions, not only in New York, but around the entire United States, put all of their faith in the Democratic Party, even after these politicians establish a pattern of consistently breaking promises and forcing austerity measures onto the working class of our cities, insisting that we need to “be realistic.” Because the memberships of these unions are constantly being told how much worse our situation could be, it is very difficult for most of us to envision how much better it could be if public sector workers showed real solidarity with each other at all times, realized our strength as the people who make cities run, and demanded real wage increases and the restoration of the massive cuts to social services that were designed to make working people pay for the crisis of capitalism. We must also start running our own working-class, independent political candidates for office if the municipal labor unions of New York City and the entire U.S. if we are to have a chance of pushing back against anti-worker, anti-union policies.
While the new teachers’ contract in New York City is a real setback, it is not the end of the struggle to defend public education or public sector trade unionism. Teachers, parents and students must unite to demand an end to high stakes testing and a massive investment in education to radically reduce class size. Further provocations from corporate America and its political minions like the new wave of lawsuits aimed at eliminating teacher tenure will inevitably provoke resistance. Furthermore, the struggles of other workers, including fast food workers and the fight for a $15 minimum wage, can lift the sights of demoralized sections of the unionized workforce and show them that the road of struggle and a split from the Democratic Party in favor of running workers’ candidates are the only ways to defend past gains and secure real gains in the future. Without this the very existence of public sector unionism in the form in which it has existed will be in jeopardy.

Counter

About Me

Norm Scott worked in the NYC school system from 1967 to 2002, spending 30 of those years teaching elementary school in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn (District 14). He retired in July 2002. He has been active in education reform and in the UFT, often as a critic of union policy, since 1970, working with a variety of groups. In 1996 he began publishing Education Notes, a newsletter for teachers attending the UFT Delegate Assembly. In 2002, he expanded the paper into a 16-page tabloid, printing up to 25,000 copies distributed to teacher mailboxes through Ed Notes supporters. Education Notes started publishing a blog in Aug. 2006. Norm also writes the School Scope education column for The Wave, the Rockaway Beach community newspaper.